#moody maximalist ideas

[hermoodymaximalismhome]

[hermaximalismhome]

[heavensmortuary]

3, 5, 11

3. Favorite things you’ve made?

Honestly, I think some of my favorite things I’ve made are sketchbook scans that I’ve gradient mapped

I like how grungy and loose they look, I can compile all my ideas/thoughts into one page and make it look kinda cohesive with enough effort and I really enjoy making these. almost everything I liked was spur of the moment, don’t worry and don’t think too hard about stuff

honorable mentions of other stuff I still like

5. How would you describe your style?

gosh I’m not sure; there’s a lot of things I *want* it to be, but I’m just working with what I know for now. it changes a lot. I think stuff I like is very moody, expressive, maximalist, messy. I wish my stuff was more expressive/gestural/stylized, but I’m having fun just learning :]

11. Do you listen to anything while drawing?

all the time, otherwise I won’t feel motivated to draw. if I’m working on commissions, I usually put on an audiobook or an analysis video so I remain focused. If it’s on personal stuff, I usually listen to whatever matches the vibe of the drawing. I have SO many playlists

[lovejustforaday]

Shoegaze Classics - Doppelgänger

Doppelgänger - Curve (1992)

Main Genres - Shoegaze, Alternative Dance

A decent sampling of: Industrial Rock, Ethereal Wave, Dream Pop, Neo-Psychedelia

The common story of the origins of the term "shoegaze" itself is often told in a way that would suggest the term's meaning is twofold.

The more literal meaning comes from the heavy usage of multiple guitar pedals for bands to achieve their signature swirling, washy, dense guitar sounds, the guitarists spending more time at live shows staring down at their feet as they prepared to adjust their pedal board.

But it is also often implied that the idea of these bands coming to be known as "shoegazers" is for the generally introverted, shy, wall-flower disposition of the performers. I suppose it doesn't help that long bangs that hide the face, and baggy clothes were common fashion choices for the scene at the time. Of course, your mileage with this stereotype will vary depending on the band.

Next on my shoegaze classics retrospective, I wanted to take a look at a band that defies the wall-flower stereotype of the shoegazers, by taking the genre's signature heavy guitar reverb and turning it into the most bewitching, trancey, and euphoric 90s dance music. Today, we will be discussing Curve.

The Band

Curve emerged onto the London alternative scene in 1990 as a creative duo, comprised of the mysterious, semi-goth and generally badass vocalist and guitarist Toni Halliday, and the guitarist, bassist, drummer and programmer Dean Garcia, a signature lover of wearing sunglasses even at night.

It's easy to say that Toni Halliday had a considerably more memorable stage presence than almost any other frontman, woman, or person in the shoegazing scene. Her performances were animated, but in a very transfixed sort of way, her eyes casting a piercing gaze, with a dark and commanding, but nonetheless ethereal contralto voice coming out of what seems like a rather small woman.

Aesthetically, Curve were kind of in a separate category from most other shoegaze bands. They seemed to have more of a sleek, futuristic, and dare I say sexy image as a band. This was also reflected in their sound, which was decidedly much more intertwined with uptempo 90s dance music and industrial rock, their performances more frenetic and adrenergic.

Unfortunately, Curve is a band whose legacy has been obscured by tired comparisons (and the surrounding discourse) to garbage. *cough* that is, as in the band Garbage. So much so, that I feel compelled to take a minute of my own review to chime in with my own two cents on this ridiculously clichéd fan dispute. For those not in the know, Garbage were a frankly much more commercially successful and mainstream alternative rock outfit from the 90s, started by legendary Nevermind and Siamese Dream producer Butch Vig and a couple of his buddies, plus the 90s most iconically sullen yet outspoken Shirley Manson. The band already started out with connections to some of the biggest 90s alternative bands, most notably Smashing Pumpkins and The Foo Fighters.

Garbage has often been accused of ripping off Curve's sound and style, and at the very least, there are some undeniable similarities. Both bands took a maximalist approach to their sound, making layered, dancey alternative rock that incorporated many of the emerging subgenres of the time, and both with a moody "sad chick" contralto vocalist.

I'll be transparent: Garbage was (along with Smashing Pumpkins and The Cranberries), the band that really got me into 90s alternative rock. There was a time in high school when I was much less versed, and considered them to be one of, if not my #1 favourite band. Like many of my generation, I first learned about Curve THROUGH these comparisons.

And so I imagine it's hard for OG Curve fans not to look at Garbage's success, notice how a decent part of that success was tied to Butch Vig's industry connections, and not become very resentful towards Garbage and the band's many fans.

But let's also be fair: neither Curve nor Garbage were the first band to have a glum, sardonic female vocalist (Lydia Lunch and Kim Gordon come to mind almost immediately). Neither band invented the alternative dance subgenre. And to their credit, Garbage has acknowledged the comparisons to Curve over the years while only having nice things to say about the smaller band. Lesser people with bigger egos from that time (*cough* Billy Corgan *cough* Courtney Love) probably would've taken the opportunity to shit on the band.

Moreover, as their inclusion in this list would suggest, Curve were and are a shoegaze band first, which is a pretty clear distinction. Garbage's sound was never really shoegaze at all; at best, there's a lot of noise pop on the first Garbage record. But Garbage's brand of alternative rock is a lot more poppy, and sometimes trip hoppy (which was hugely successful in the 90s). Likewise, Curve's sound was almost certainly never going to go as mainstream as Garbage. And that's okay, because most great music doesn't go mainstream.

But honestly, even having to acknowledge all of this is kinda lame. It's beating a dead horse that's already been dead for at least 20 years, and Curve's legacy as a band should not be "the band that was Garbage before Garbage".

Instead, Curve should be understood as shoegaze pioneers, being one of the first shoegaze bands to experiment with fusing electronica elements, and playing around with more studio-based guitar sound layering. They are the studio nerds of the original scene, and they deserve to be celebrated for their gorgeously crafted, methodical 90s hybrid sound. Shoegaze walls of sound had never felt this pristine.

The Record

Doppelgänger is Curve's debut record, released after a string of EPs and subsequent compilation LP, as per usual for 90s first wave British bands. It is by all means a very stylish sounding record, co-produced with the famed alternative producer Flood, who's impressive resume of collaborative work spans from electronic bands like New Order and Depeche Mode to abrasive alternative rock like P.J. Harvey and The Jesus And Mary Chain.

As I've hinted at already, this is one of the most 'produced' albums of the first wave of shoegaze records. Far from being a negative, I really enjoy this approach. There is a lot of layering of different tracks happening in the mix, and the whole project comes together as this really punchy, roaring, and technicolor shoegaze that feels very urban and dancefloor ready for your local goth club.

The album's second single "Horror Head" is, put simply, one of the many masterpieces of the first wave of shoegaze. Among the trippiest and most surreal songs of its era, with dazzling, iridescent guitar feedback, sparkling drum machine sounds bouncing off of thin metallic sheets, and sonic colours of violet and indigo. Toni's haunting refrain of "heys" guide the listener to an enchanted nowhere like little forest fairies, while her deliciously dark lead vocals peek through all the many layers with the sense of a delirious protagonist in the songs' swirling universe. Like having the most unusually pleasant sensory overload headache.

As the second track on the record, this is frankly an incredibly hard act to follow, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that some other tracks feel like an attempt to recapture the godlike production of "Horror Head".

Oh, and for some odd reason, the version of the track that I downloaded off of Bandcamp is compressed and a little bass-heavy, versus the version on most other platforms. It would be a bit unfortunate if it is indeed an album/single discrepancy, since the mastering of the version up on YouTube is definitely superior. Regardless, I will judging this based off of the superior version, because its my blog and I can do what I want. Plus, in the age of mp3 files you can just go in and switch it out anyway.

Another standout moment is "Lillies Dying", the most rhythmic song on the record, with a groovy semi-baggy bassline, a descending, melting vocal lead, and a grainy sandstorm of guitar soundscapes. Music for a rave in a barren wasteland, makes me feel like spinning in circles.

I also really like the other single "Faît Accompli", less of a shoegaze track and more of a jagged, darkly erotic industrial rock dancefloor banger. Feels very intended for accompanying a light bondage session in a dimly lit BDSM dungeon.

The record eschews the dance beats for closer "Sandpit", a more atmospheric and introspective song featuring a more traditional combination of dream pop and shoegaze. The track is a nice palette cleanser, bringing a night of Dionysian wonders and relentless dancefloor madness to a definitive close with soft headphone sounds to acompany the bleary transit ride home.

What Came After That?

Curve had a longer original run than most first wave shoegaze bands, releasing 5 LPs from Doppelganger up to their last record in 2002 titled The New Adventures of Curve. I have not heard any of these records in full, but it seems like the band largely continued to do their thing, sometimes veering more into industrial rock territory.

Since then, the band has remained largely inactive save for a few archival releases. Curve are not among the many bands like Slowdive and Ride whom have gotten back together to record and release new records in the 2010s and 2020s.

Toni Halliday started a solo project in 2008 called Chatelaine which has also been mostly inactive, meanwhile Dean Garcia has been in and contributed to about a dozen bands since Curve finished.

But then not every band should have to keep putting out records indefinitely. Curve has a respectable discography, and I've heard bits and pieces from Cuckoo and the more overtly electronic Come Clean that assure me I would thoroughly enjoy those albums as well.

As it stands, Doppelgänger is inadvertently probably one of the most prescient shoegaze records of the 90s, even if it isn't nearly as acclaimed as any of the big three. There were several bands that blended with electronic dance music during the 2000s Nu-Gaze revival that owe a bit of influence to Curve whether they know it or not.

I also feel like this record broke ground for a lot of late 90s records in the alternative scene that were getting darker and dancier, like Smashing Pumpkins' Adore and Tori Amos' From The Choirgirl Hotel.

So here's to Curve, the too often unsung pioneers and studio witchcraft makers of the 90s first wave of shoegaze.

8/10

Highlights: "Horror Head", "Lillies Dying", "Faît Accompli", "Sandpit"

[apartmentforyouandme]

Pops of olive green and gold having a moment on my Pinterest board:

In other news, I’ll be moving into a new house in the next couple months, and really hope to document the decorating process on here!

[eyeliner-and-c1garettes]

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

[mediaonedesign]

Lovsports.co - Throw My Threes Around My Eyes And Then I Call It My Disguise Shirt

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But such is the Throw My Threes Around My Eyes And Then I Call It My Disguise Shirt moreover I love this sartorial savvy of Beyoncé. She has developed a penchant for pulling multiple looks—in varying colorways and shades—for a single tour, often bringing new custom looks in and out for a specific leg of a tour or a marquee performance. But the Renaissance world tour takes the idea of constant reinvention, long popular among female pop stars especially, to unprecedented heights. There is a seemingly never ending stream of shiny, disco era inflected looks that build upon Renaissance’s ballroom inspired sonic and visual aesthetic, styled by KJ Moody, Shiona Turini, Karen Langley, and Julia Sarr Jamois. There’s something campy and almost Barbie like about the sheer scope of the singer’s wardrobe at this point. It aligns with the maximalist, more is more theme of Renaissance and its celebration of ballroom culture. In the underground world of ballroom and drag, largely populated by marginalized Black and brown queer voices, there is nothing more aspirational than unbounded excess.

It’s easy for one to get the Throw My Threes Around My Eyes And Then I Call It My Disguise Shirt moreover I love this sense that Beyoncé is changing clothes so frequently and so wildly not particularly because she has to maintain our attention, but because she wants to. It would make sense for an artist, album, and tour squarely focused on self determination and control. One of the show’s interludes features an emcee, full of boastful sass, poking fun at fans’ never ending pleas and thirst for supporting Renaissance music videos. “You’ve asked for the visuals,” the voice says. “You’ve called for the queen. But a queen moves at her own pace.” There are no visuals yet, but there has been an effective and fabulous exploration of the album’s world through a plethora of looks, including ones worn in the “I’m That Girl” teaser visual, appearances at the Grammys, and a haute couture collaboration with Olivier Rousteing at Balmain. In fact, the aesthetic has been so well constructed that fans are eagerly replicating and building upon it with their own looks. There are undoubtedly more custom looks to come from Beyoncé—she has not even made her way through the reported 41 custom pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes she bought along for the ride. It would make sense if the North American section of the tour, which kicks off next month, features even more considered and specific references to cities. Wearing the designs of New York–based designer Telfar while in the New York City area could be fun and meaningful. Perhaps she could wear a gown by Taiwanese Canadian designer Jason Wu while performing in Toronto. There are a lot of possibilities. But then again, Beyoncé has always marched to the beat of her own fashion drum, so it’s possible she has different plans entirely. As she’s told us, a queen moves at her own pace.

Home: Click here to visit our store: Lovsports.co

[mi6021alishia]

Set Styling Research

For my new project I have made a complete house layout in Blender. I took a floor plan I liked after browsing a few in a real estate website featuring luxury homes because conceptually considering the original story of multiple heros living together there would need to be ample living space for a lot of people. I made some alterations in order to use the space the way I felt would be the best  for the characters. They are rather jouvenile heros they all have their own interests and I imagined that the house owner and teacher of the heros would likely host parties with high up politicians to raise funds to maintain their secrecy. I watched a LOT of interior design and architectural shows and videos on youtube and really put my head into being a bit like a tv/movie designer whilst still considering functionality of what these characters need from a home.

I watched Grand Designs, Your Home Made Perfect, Interior Design Masters and Dream Homes on Netflix.

 I also watched videos on youtube from The Sorry Girls, Tina Le, DIY Danie, xo macenna, LoneFox, and Alexandra Gater, as they have great ideas on style, on storage solution, on good room configuration (particularly Alexandra Gater as her clients tend to live in tiny cramped studio apartments and she makes those spaces feel much larger.) I also watched a lot of Architectural Digest in their series of designers creating furniture, designing spaces and their Open Door series, from that I took inspiration from the book shelf created by designer Leonard Bessemer in this video:

Troye Sivan, Bretman Rock and Kylie Jenner's homes in the Open Door series specifically the plants from Bretman Rock, the overal cosy, classy eclictic vibe of Troye Sivan's and I fell in love with the living room and light fixtures in Kylie Jenner's home.

I found I particularly gravitated towards midcentury and dark and moody, maximalist styles, they feel cosy, classic, a bit older and especially in terms of midcentury, timeless.

Making all the house in blender really helps keep things to scale when drawing and makes it a lot easier for me to see the character moving through the space for when I'm animating her, keeping everything to scale as the perspective changes.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Grace’s moody living room. 

via moody maximalism

[ts1989fanatic]

Taylor Swift’s folklore Isn’t a Return to Her Roots, But Somewhere She’s Never Been

Almost a year ago, Taylor Swift released Lover, a lively course correction intended, in part, to craft a more measured and mature style for the singer, whose previous album, Reputation, had used withering sarcasm and hip-hop production elements to wage war with Swift’s crumbling, goodie-two-shoes image and the enemies poking holes in the narrative. In January’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana, which chronicled the Lover sessions and revisited key career moves in the preceding decade, Swift admitted to being driven, on a certain level, by a hunger for public approval: “My entire moral code is a need to be thought of as good,” she said. 1989’s pop turn was really a quest to be seen as the total package in music, an overcorrection for the embarrassment at the 2009 MTV VMAs. The country era before that had been a bit of an act of folksy people-pleasing, too. Lover, it seemed, was the real deal. But even that was a charm offensive of a sort, heralded by blindingly bright music videos and bustling, busy melodies.

Amid the R&B/soul underpinnings of “False God” and “I Forgot That You Existed,” the droning synths of “The Archer,” the high school melodrama of “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince,” the maximalist pop radio fare of “Me!” and “You Need to Calm Down,” and the rustic repose of “Soon You’ll Get Better” and the title track, half a dozen possible Taylors emerged from the pyre on which the old Taylor burned. Again, Swift created distance between her past and present by arming herself with different toys. You could argue that the singer’s eighth album folklore, announced and released in a whirlwind 24 hours just before the weekend, is another sweeping recalibration, trading soaring melodies and effervescent production for moody, introspective folk-pop. But it undersells the true utility of this stripped affair to say it’s just a new sandbox for Taylor. What’s striking about this collection of songs is the relative lack of a fussy new sound and an obvious single. Loosed from the responsibility of piquing the audience’s interest with a rollout dotted with attention-grabbing gestures, Swift is left with just her feelings and her stories.

By challenging the very idea of what a pop song needs to bring to the table in order to make a complete statement, folklore proves that Taylor Swift doesn’t need to make as much noise to get through to us as she has in the past ten years of molting stylistic restlessness. The autumnal accompaniments, provided by the National’s Aaron Dessner alongside his brother and bandmate, Bryce, as well as Swift’s longtime production partner Jack Antonoff, are not a rejection of pop music so much as a reduction. In the quiet of a tune like “my tears ricochet,” all vocals and slowly swelling electroacoustic instruments, there’s nothing to hide behind — no loud, obvious, radio-friendly bells and whistles to elevate hit potential. A middling lyricist and melodicist wouldn’t be able to carry it. The album floats because, beneath the dramatic twists, Taylor Swift is a writer’s writer. Her stories here are more purposeful, if a little less personal. She’s obsessed not just with people falling in and out of love, but the long tail of these connections. There is a Faulknerian interest in multiple outside protagonists and in stories that span decades. The “folk” in folklore isn’t so much a statement of purpose with regard to genre as it is a signal that this is her storytelling album. The Dessners’ trademark folk-pop quietude, at least as manifested on the National’s 2019 album I Am Easy to Find, is the perfect canvas for Swift to show her wares and nod to her influences.

From the title to the music, folklore is an album about the wisdom and experience passed down through generations. On the opener “the 1,” Swift muses languidly: “You know, the greatest loves of all time are over now.” It doesn’t stop her from pining for a storybook romance of her own or gesturing to some of the great love songs in recent history in her writing. The track “the last great american dynasty” recounts the tale of the heyday of Rebekah Harkness, the ill-fated oil heiress and philanthropist whose family life was marred by suicide attempts and murder charges. “mad woman” appears to pick the story back up years later, as a nameless woman stews in spite over a life lived under public scrutiny. “epiphany” is a flashback to Swift’s grandfather’s involvement in World War II’s Operation Watchtower, the inaugural land offensive in the war against Japan and its acquisitions across the Pacific, that uses a wounded soldier’s dark night of the soul to spin a timely yarn about courage in spite of illness and the nearness of mortality. folklore uses allegory to illuminate present realities the way great American songwriters and archivists do. Swift is able to address recent troubles with music industry men and tap into the era’s chilling pulse without naming culprits, to point out the universality of American calamity without being bogged down by specifics.

While it does all that, folklore pays respects to its predecessors, left turns in rock and pop history like the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore, a gothic folk opus borne out of death and doused in electronic atmospherics from Nitzer Ebb’s Bon Harris; Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, the Boss’s synth-laced snapshot of a crumbling marriage and a band on the precipice of an extended hiatus; and Automatic for the People, where R.E.M. made a mint ditching the pop smarts of “Shiny Happy People” and “Stand,” fixating instead on pain and loss in a series of acoustic career highlights. It’s reductive to call Folklore the return to Taylor Swift’s roots some have been waiting for since the EDM excursions on 2012’s Red became the main thrust of 1989. It’s more like a trip to an alternate universe where Rough Trade and 4AD indie rock and dream pop acts like Mazzy Star and the Cocteau Twins played the same field as blockbuster artists of the ‘90s like the Cranberries and Sarah McLachlan. It also fulfills the promise of the Cowboy Junkies fan service in Lover’s title track and confirms the subtle, wide-reaching impact of the electroacoustic warfare at work in the recent Bon Iver albums, which is, itself, a mutant strain of ‘80s and ‘90s Americana.

It’s tempting to say that folklore is a breakup album of sorts, but it’s not necessarily obvious what Taylor Swift is breaking up with here. Is she done with Joe Alwyn, the boyfriend whose secret companionship seemed to inspire the giddier songs on Reputation and Lover? Is she through with trying to please every audience at once, pitching massive singles into the space between pop, hip-hop, and dance music? Or is she, like the rest of us, just missing a life where we could go and behave as we pleased, responding to the jarring shift in the mechanics of friendships, relationships, work life, and nightlife by sliding under her covers and playing sad songs until the outside world fades from view? Maybe she’ll tell us next year.

[caveatauditor]

Best albums of 2018

A marvelous year! Just because Drake albums are long and boring doesn’t mean the album is dead, you know.

1. Bali Baby, Baylor Swift

This 8-song EP, a fusion of SoundCloud rap, emo confessional, and glitzy synthpop, rocks harder and weirder than anything I heard all year. The spiky synthesizers, bent guitars, drum crunches, scratchy screeches, Bali’s garbled wails, and plastic bubblegum surface combine several modes of abrasion, as the Atlanta rapper hides a harrowing breakup saga beneath bucketloads of noise and the crackling electricity sets her bleeding heart ablaze. “Candy” and “Electrical” are neon new wave ballads distorted into fragility through harshness. Whenever she gets a handle on something, the beat goes squelch and sends her reeling. Oh, to be loud, obnoxious, and heartbroken. She’s been putting out fire with gasoline.

2. Ariana Grande, Sweetener

“Snuggle jams,” tweeted Austin Brown. We all needed snuggles this year! Although “Thank U, Next” and Thank U, Next have somewhat eclipsed the confectionary sugarbomb Instagram’s newly crowned Most Followed Woman released six months earlier, said sugarbomb continues to sparkle. Tired of flaunting her multioctave voice, Ariana leans into her breathy lower register and discovers her capacity for play. Tired of secondhand funk pastiche, Pharrell invents a sunny electrobouncy sound that abounds with pattering percussion, thwocks, squiggles, splashes of electronic color. Contextualized by the devastating, mournful grace of “Breathin” and “No Tears Left to Cry”, her joy feels urgent, beautiful, earned. Behold an album of exquisitely honeyed lightness. I love Sweetener because it’s the musical equivalent of booping someone on the nose.

3. BTS, Love Yourself: Tear

Because they both flatter and subvert even the most boring aspects of contemporary American pop, they broke through in America where countless Korean stars couldn’t, although that didn’t stop BoA and Girls Generation from trying. (I hope we haven’t forgotten BoA’s excellent self-titled English-language album, which includes the funniest Britney impersonations ever recorded.) Slow, moody, blank--these adjectives don’t quite describe BTS, thankfully, but they have reclaimed a rather empty pop style as a site for cognitively dissonant structural innovations, and thus offer hope that said pop style needn’t be so empty. Dense and streamlined simultaneously, stuffing all sorts of wacky noises into what Anglophone hitmakers have defined as a spare, echoey sonic template, these tracks are hard to wrap your ear around at first, but what noises! I could listen to the plinky little drumclicks in “Anpanman” forever.

4. Jonghyun, Poet Artist

“Take the Dive” and “Only One You Need” should play like standard romantic invitations and instead break a cold sweat in sheer terror. On “Hashtag” he’s content to whisper as long as the electric piano matches the beat in his head. “I’m So Curious” coaxes him into a sublimely cozy erotic space. The lightest and most delicate of pop-R&B exercises, shivering beneath an immaculately chilly surface, Jonghyun’s second and final album is beautiful and makes me sad. Rest in peace. 

5. J Balvin, Vibras

The year’s solidest and bounciest Latin trap album is more sweetly melodic than the genre’s norm, but also harsher, which is disorienting. These beats, assembling lumbering, mechanical tanks out of looped vocal samples, clinky xylophones, keyboard scramble, and Balvin’s dreamy drone, are impossible to play in the background; I’ve tried. Maybe those blessed souls who can multitask with music on would feel differently, but every time I play this album I get sucked in, paralyzed by the chopped-up airhorns in “Ambiente”, the guitar strummed through a wind tunnel in “Brillo” (a duet with Rosalia!), the drums beeping in “Ahora”, the angel of death moaning inarticulately throughout “Cuando Tu Quieras”. If I also don’t understand how the hell clubgoers can dance to this music, please understand my bewilderment as admiration.

6. Playboi Carti, Die Lit

The debut was sufficiently spare to retain a semblance of pop functionality; this one’s a shoegaze record, the sound of rap abstracted into a gorgeous blur. The average Carti song is a single giant, repeated, woozy keyboard hook, glitching and jittering around the edges, a transmission from the hazy corner of the subconscious where bliss keels over into numbness and the senses conflate. The rapping is minimal; he chooses his sounds phonetically, not semantically, and gladly disappears beneath the relentless aqueous whoosh. Lyrics, guest features, tempo changes, coherent thoughts--if these things exist, they get swept up too. After years of hearing people moan on the radio about washing pain away with stimulants and such, here’s what it means to be insensate. Although the album wanders a little toward the end, who cares when it’s all one hypnotic song?

7. US Girls, In a Poem Unlimited

The music on this remarkable art-pop document assembles a creepy rubberoid disco groove from shards of glass, sleek rhythm guitar, controlled blasts of distortion, sordid saxophone; Meghan Remy treats white funk as industrial noise. The lyrics compile situation after situation in which women are abused, including a song where St. Peter rapes the narrator before letting her into heaven. Is this what “dialectic” means?

8. Haru Nemuri, Harutosyura

So raucous in the way it arranges sugary keyboard splashes, so catchy in the way it explodes with carefully timed bursts of electric noise, Haru Nemuri’s debut confounds categories. The Japanese noise-pop eccentric crams all the sounds she loves--raw guitars, bubbly synthesizers, anguished screams, conspicuous digital edits--into a glitchy hall of mirrors. For fans of certain video game soundtracks and experimental classical compositions, this is the music you’ve been imagining your whole life; for ordinary pop fans it’s merely the wackiest of syntheses. Either way, Harutosyura is gloriously loud, burning with a fierce rock grandiosity that’s unexpected, hence awesome. When “Harutosyura” gets artificially sped up into a chipmunked vacuum, pauses a moment, and comes back rocking harder than ever, she spirals ever closer to infinite refraction.

9. Erin Lee, Love Song

This strange album comprises ten instrumental pieces for unaccompanied acoustic guitar, plucking out pastoral melodies with a vaguely Mediterranean flavor, like music that might appear in a historical romantic drama featuring sailors, grapes, wine, and such. One could reasonably dismiss this music, but I can’t stop playing it--as with film scores and Snail’s House albums, there are certain qualities that make an instrumental melody intrinsically sentimental, and I’d love to know what they are. In the calmly strummed “My Hometown Harbor”, the sun sets over the water, the boats dock, shouts ring out from the pub several blocks down, and there’s danger in the air. 

10. Ashley Monroe, Sparrow

“I’m good at leaving,” Ashley Monroe once sang, and these restless songs about departure and existential longing translate the impulse behind Joni Mitchell’s Hejira into country music, where it belongs. Country is the ideal genre for confessions of solitude and rootlessness because it’s supposed to imply rootedness, tradition, community; the juxtaposition conveys a sense of profound rupture. Monroe’s velvet moan and Dave Cobb’s theatrical string arrangements are exemplary bedmates. Hidden beneath a soft, warm glow lies the year’s loneliest album.

11. Gazelle Twin, Pastoral

When I first heard this crunchy slab of avant-dance music, the shrieks and chalkboard scratches and keyboards used as percussive elements jarred; it took several listens to notice that some of the scratches are digitally altered harpsichords, that flutes and sleigh bells adorn the otherwise turbulent tracks, and that Elizabeth Bernholz’s artificially growled lyrics repurpose quotes from Blake and English folk songs into angry social commentary. The segue between “Dance of the Peddlers” and “Hobby Horse” still terrifies me. If the idea of an ironic, politically-minded fusion of electronic dissonance, English folk, and classical music sounds mannered and absurd, you’re not wrong, but that idea’s musical realization is a whirlwind of rage and menace.

12. Amnesia Scanner, Another Life

This Finnish, Berlin-based pair of electronica producers have scored gallery openings and reportedly have many thoughts about technology and modern life, so I don’t doubt they have their avant-credentials in order. What I’m certain of is that these are the funniest EDM squelches I’ve heard in ages--distorted drops, vocoded shrieks, percussive jackhammers, digitally mediated farts and belches, not to mention outrageously catchy hooks. If the hyperactive musical splatter is intended to convey the sensory overload of our modern dystopian age, it also satisfies my own longing for music that bristles with noises, kitsch, stimulus.

13. Ski Mask the Slump God, Stokeley

In 2009, the Albuquerque emo-rap group Brokencyde combined maximalist crunk with bloodcurdling screamo choruses, and were widely panned as a record low point in pop music history. “Even if I caught Prince Harry and Gary Glitter adorned in Nazi regalia defecating through my grandmother’s letterbox I would still consider making them listen to this album too severe a punishment,” claimed one NME review. A decade later, the same exact music is now considered the surreal, groundbreaking, SoundCloud-warped future. Be careful who you mock, lest their ghost come back to haunt you.

14. Rosalia, El Mal Querer

Rosalia’s flamenco-R&B uses cool, exact technological control, sparse electrobeats and syncopated handclaps, to modulate a ferocious natural force, i.e. her singing. A modern adaptation of the anonymous 13th-century novel Flamenca, El Mal Querer is a wild exercise in vocal melodrama, especially because she’s always messing with her voice electronically. Layering her sighs over each other in the endless echo chamber that is “Pienso En Tu Mira”, looping a single note into an isolated stutter in “De Aqui No Sales”, showing off her melisma in “Reniego”, she understands how expression must be filtered through media and is inevitably distorted.

15. Noname, Room 25

The Chicago rapper’s fluttery jazz beats, wispy strings, woodwinds, and hushed rhymes are so calm and thoughtful the music sounds more like slam poetry with accompaniment than any conventional style of rap. By describing love, sadness, police violence, and the banality of daily life in the same cautiously awestruck tone, she depicts an internal resilience that comes into being through the act of aspiration. I love how slight this album is--her modest quietude is a splash of cold water in the face.

16. Sunmi, Warning

The former Wonder Girl refashions herself as a defiant siren-heroine, insisting “Get away out of my face” over electrobeats that crest and surge with military efficiency. Although the singles from this 7-song EP got the attention, her most exquisitely sheathed stiletto is “Curve”, whose bent jazz piano complements a chorus of staccato whispers that should sound inviting and instead exude menace. 

17. Hailu Mergia, Lala Belu

After several reissues of his ‘80s music by Awesome Tapes From Africa, here’s the Ethiopian jazz keyboardist’s first album in forever, looking back on a genre of retro-futurist cocktail music whose benevolent visions of a utopian clubland didn’t come to pass, for how could they, but are ready to be reclaimed. Over relaxed drum shuffles, friendly plinky piano, billowing organ, Mergia coaxes weird noises from skewed, accordionesque synthesizers and dreams about parties where such music could play.

18. Haruru Inu Love Dog Tenshi, Lost Lost Dust Dream

The next time you hear someone complain about SoundCloud rap, please direct them to this eerie, plaintive, whispered exercise in polished incongruence. “I’m Dreaming” captures the moment when you’re still asleep but trying to wake up, straining to clear the clouds from your brain.

19. Camp Cope, How to Socialise and Make Friends

With hundreds of lo-fi Bandcamp mixtapes bouncing around out there, I can’t explain why one guitar band moves me rather than another, but there’s an emotional rawness to this album that rivets. Partially it’s the rhythm guitar sound, which skips along with syncopated flatness and resilience. Partially it’s the sharpness of Georgia Maq’s voice, and the way she uses drawn-out vowels to focus and redirect her sustained roars. Partially it’s the songwriting, which finds an antidote to the world’s grossness in friendship, community, quiet moments of kindness. If you’re exhausted and fed up after a lifetime of taking shit, venting your feelings to the simple clunk of loud guitar music is a pleasure precisely because it’s simple and clunky. “Get it all out/put it in a song,” she insists, endorsing and providing a cathartic fury.

20. Bhad Bhabie, 15

Danielle Bregoli’s ebullient chirps are joyfully defiant only insofar as defiance is a front for insecurity. Aggressive trap beats turned covertly melancholy long ago, but in this context the sadness is unmistakable. Everyone is a public figure in the age of social media, so her anxiety over existing in the public sphere is at once quotidian and heightened. This album is scarier than anyone expected.

[hermoodymaximalismhome]

[jessekg]

How Hans Zimmer's the Thin Red Line score redefined Hollywood, for better or worse Social Sharing

Hans Zimmer is the sound of Hollywood. Over the past three decades, the German composer has been behind more than 100 soundtracks and film scores, a number that grows exponentially when you consider the stable of composers under his company, Remote Control Productions, which has become the defacto studio for big live-action blockbusters.

Zimmer's big breakthrough came in 1988 with the Rain Man score, which was nominated for an Oscar. Offers poured in after that, from the Grammy-nominated Driving Miss Daisy to Thelma & Louise, which lead to the multiple-award-winning Lion King in 1994.

While the score for that picture won an Academy, Golden Globe and Grammy award, and is the basis for the most successful Broadway musical of all time, it was a quiet film by auteur Terrence Malick that would turn Zimmer into the ubiquitous presence he is today. Malick's 1999 war meditation, The Thin Red Line, is also where Zimmer says he learned the most. "I worked on that one for what must have been, in one way or the other, a couple of years," he tells q. "I kept coming back to it, but everything I learned on that then helped me a great deal."

You could even say it made his career, and even though neither the score, nor the film, won any major awards, it paved the way for the 60-year-old to become the clear predecessor to John Williams as Hollywood's go-to. You can trace it all back to one particular composition, "Journey to the Line," which appears at the climax of The Thin Red Line and is, almost 20 years later, one of the most commonly used pieces of music in Hollywood.

It begins with a ticking clock (fans of Zimmer will recognize that as a recurring feature in other Zimmer scores, especially Dunkirk), but the defining moment comes a few minutes in, when the principal theme emerges. It's a simple, trance-like movement built around a repeating four-chord structure (D minor, F, A minor, G), with a fifth (E minor) eventually added. As the structure repeats itself, it also builds in intensity, adding new instruments, such as bells, reverb-heavy brass and dramatic sustaining strings, in order to achieve its climax. Christopher Nolan has aptly described Zimmer as a "minimalist composer with a maximalist production sense."

I think it would be horrible to go and, you know, manipulate people in the way of what they should feel- Hans Zimmer

​Zimmer has described the piece as "objective," which explains its effectiveness. It expresses a sense of longing, but also hope. It's dark and moody, but also uplifting. It works perfectly whether characters are going into war or at a funeral, it elevates montages to another level, and it can also make you feel like everything will be alright in the end. In other words, it's perfect. It is a universally emotional piece of music that, in its simplicity, hits you in the very place you need it to hit.

"One of the things I really really try to do is, I try to never tell you what to feel," Zimmer says of the piece. "I just try to use the music in a funny way to open a door for you to come and have the possibility of having an emotional experience. But I think it would be horrible to go and, you know, manipulate people in the way of what they should feel, so I leave the pieces actually quite open to interpretation."

The unintended effect is that, because "Journey to the Line" fits everywhere, it's been used everywhere, including TV, film, video games and, especially, trailers, where it has become the Gold Standard.

​It also found ubiquity behind the scenes as the most commonly used piece of temp music, meaning that it's often placed in scenes during early stages of editing, before the music has been written, as a placeholder. What happens is, because it fits so well, composers are either asked to replicate it, or the studio simply buys the license for "Journey to the Line." As a result, it's become known as the "forbidden cue," and the scourge of composers everywhere, including Zimmer himself.  

"I mean, you know the worst thing," says Zimmer. "'Journey to the Line' is a particular piece and it's based on a very simple and therefore virtually un-rip-off-able idea. You move one note and it doesn't work anymore. The same with, you know there's a piece called 'Time' that I wrote for Inception that people keep sort of flattering me with I suppose."

By flattering, of course, he means borrowing, to the point where it's blurring the line between what is and isn't a Zimmer score. It's inescapable, and you can see the similarities in works like John Murphy's "Sunshine (Adagio In D Minor)," which has been used in countless trailers, including X-Men Origins: Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past and Star Trek into Darkness.

There is also Henry Jackman's "Safe Now" from Captain Phillips. Jackman, a student of Zimmer's who works for Remote Control, employs many of the same minimalist techniques to great effect, achieving an emotional punch with an endless rotation of simple chords that build in intensity. Even Zimmer himself has been accused of recycling his own ideas, including "Solomon," from 12 Years a Slave, and the above mentioned "Time," which, to oversimplify, is "Journey to the Line" with Johnny Marr playing minimalist guitar lines over it — and it's amazing. Of course the chords are different and the structure varies, but it's based on that same foundation set by Zimmer back in 1998, one even he can't escape.

In fact, the "forbidden cue" nickname comes from Zimmer himself, who has directed his staff to never use "Journey to the Line" as a temp in any of the films he's working on for fear that he will be asked, yet again, to recreate it.

As far as professional composers go, you could definitely have worse problems, as it's far better to be the person to create the Gold Standard than to be the ones that have to try to best it. But on the other hand, it also lends Zimmer's piece a sense of immortality. "Journey to the Line" was a major milestone in his career, but one that could have easily faded away in prevalence along with The Thin Red Line, one of the most underrated war films. It's permeation in scores everywhere means that it gets to live beyond its original intent, given another breath of life every time it, or an homage to it, appears again (and again). It's no wonder it's one of the most popular compositions in Zimmer's live show.  

Originally published Jan. 5, 2018

[betpiner]

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Design Dilemma: Maximalism in Denmark

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Search dining room pictures

Earlier this month, we took a look at a Danish home featuring severe minimalism. Everything was white — walls, furniture, floors. This time, we’re looking at a Danish home done up in the exact opposite style  Scandinavian maximalism!

What does that mean? Try walls painted dark moody colors, ceilings that have been stenciled in a pattern or wallpapered, floors that have also been treated the same, and plenty of art work, objects d’art, shaggy rugs and dramatic flourishes. It’s not a look that you often see in Scandinavia, but the owners of this apartment wanted to try something a little different from the all-white norm.

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Browse dining room ideas

The owner, in fact, says she doesn’t believe in half measures. When you decorate, she feels you have to go all the way. It’s not enough to paint one accent wall a brilliant color and leave everything else white, as, in her opinion, there’s no consistency. So she’s worked toward consistency by stenciling her ceilings to match all the drama down below.

Here is the ceiling during the process:

By Interiorwise København – See more Home Design Photos

And here is the finished product:

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Search living room design ideas

Opting for a dark color on the walls creates a moodiness that white walls can’t touch:

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Browse home office photos

One of the most impressively maximalist features is a dining room wall papered with the image of a Spoonbill bird. The owner found the poster online for $500:

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Discover family room design ideas

The bedroom ceilings have been painted as well, providing lots of color and pattern. The ceiling is painted gold and black and decorated with old playbills and Bjørn Wiinblad posters.

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – More bedroom photos

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Search bedroom pictures

And here’s the kitchen:

Photo by Rasmus Malmstrøm/ Kopenhagen Collective – Look for kitchen pictures

Kudos to this homeowner for being brave enough to challenge the conventional Scandi all-white look! We think the moody coziness of the space is perfect for short gray Danish days and long dark Danish nights!

This is a post from Home Design Find Design Dilemma: Maximalism in Denmark

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